by Alan Paul
SRV: The blues always sounded more like “the real thing” than anything else. It’s not like I automatically said, “This is cooler than this,” or “This has more emotion.” When I heard it, it slayed me! There was just not a question. Hearing it all these different ways, from the English blues boom to authorized recordings to shitty bootleg stuff of everybody you can dream of, it was like, if you can hear it, do it. The more I heard, the better I liked what I heard.
Between listening to the feeling in the music and watching my brother, and how much feeling he had with it, I picked up big-time inspiration. What I was getting out of it wasn’t so much technical; just the thought of them playing made me want to jump up and play.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: If you want to be a blues guitar player, there’s no better place to grow up than Texas. We can start with T-Bone Walker and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and you don’t even need to go further, but there’s fifty more examples.
SRV: I had a bunch of T-Bone’s records, like “T-Bone Shuffle,” “Stormy Monday,” “Cold, Cold Feeling.” A lot of ’em I don’t remember the names of; I just know the way they go. T-Bone was the first guy to play behind his head, and on his back, on the floor. Those were all T-Bone tricks. And Guitar Slim.
GARY WILEY: We used to crawdad fish in a little creek near our house in Cockrell Hill. My brother Mark, Steve, and I were down there when a couple of guys in a car came by and started bullying us. Jim, who was about thirteen, came over and stood up to those guys, who were a lot bigger than him. He actually got in a fistfight with one of them, and they left. That’s the kind of guy he is. He stepped in against odds and protected us. Jimmie was like the big brother to all of us.
By 1964, when he was thirteen, Jimmie was playing in his first proper band, the Swinging Pendulums, and the gigs would often become Vaughan family affairs.
At home in Oak Cliff. (Courtesy Jimmie Vaughan)
SRV: When Jimmie first started playing out, Daddy was trying to manage him, so we all went to see him play!
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: He’d put us in the back of his pickup truck and take us to the gig. The band was called the Swinging Pendulums, if you can believe it. In the summer, we had a seven-nights-a-week gig, and I couldn’t get in the club alone. The parents had to rotate, and more often than not they would all show up. “We have to take the kids down the club tonight.” They enjoyed it, too. They get to see their kids play and hang out in a beer joint on a weeknight with a good excuse.
The Cockrell Hill Jubilee on June 26, 1965, is believed to be Stevie’s first public performance; he was ten years old. His first band, the Chantones, performed using the gear of the Swinging Pendulums, who also played and were featured in The Dallas Morning News two weeks later. Writer Francis Raffetto wrote that the troupe of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds “are probably the only combo in town playing in a beer-dispensing tavern but too young to work without their parents.… The combo, paid $75 a week each by the Beachcomber, wears red-and-white candy-striped T-shirts.”
Stevie in the Chantones. (Courtesy Joe Allen Cook Family Collection)
SRV: Jimmie showed me a lot of stuff, but there was also a time when he warned, “If you ask me to show you anything again, I’ll kick your ass.” Well, I did, and he did. A lot of the time, I just watched him play. The greatest thing was that Jimmie taught me how to listen so I could teach myself.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: I showed him the way initially, but he found his voice himself. I was learning, too. You know, big brothers always bullshit their little brothers a little bit. That’s part of their job! They don’t know why they do it, but they do. When you’re a kid, the only person who asks you questions is your little brother, so they’ve got to be good answers.
The whole notion that we could be musicians was way out. It was an impossible thing, but when you’re a kid, you don’t know and you don’t care because everything’s impossible.
SRV: Jimmie had several bands, such as Sammy Loria and the Penetrations. You know the song “Penetration”? It was pretty cool. Obviously, they were into girls.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: I went from the Swinging Pendulums to Sammy Loria and the Penetrations. I played rhythm guitar opposite Johnny Peebles, who was very much a mentor not only in guitar playing but in life, because he did what he wanted, had a car, played in clubs six nights a week, stayed out all night, and he was a real musician. We did “Bony Moronie,” rock and roll, and we wore fancy jackets and did “steps.” I was already into it when the Beatles came out in 1964. Then I heard the Yardbirds and said, “Yeah, I love that!”
LINDA CASCIO, Vaughan cousin: They were always playing us the newest records when we visited. One time, Stevie put on the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” and we all sat around and listened.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: When I was about fourteen, I started going to the Empire Ballroom to see guys like Freddie King, B. B. King, T-Bone Walker, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. I’d sneak out, take a cab over, and watch the headliner and the house band, Mo Thomas and the Arrows. The guy at the front door would go around, let me in the back door, and kind of keep an eye on me.
SRV: After “Wham!” I also played along with [The Yardbirds’] “Jeff’s Boogie” and “Over Under Sideways Down.” Lots of Hendrix, of course. Clapton stuff with [John] Mayall. Get your Rickenbacker bass and go crazy playing “Lady Madonna,” just like everybody.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: A friend of mine had an uncle who lived in England. He knew we were into blues, so he sent the Bluesbreakers record to his little nephew. The guy got it in the mail, called me up, and said, “Hey, man, I got this record you’d probably like.” He played it over the phone, and I was like, “Damn! What is that?” It was just wild, heavy, emotional. It was B. B. King, but it wasn’t! Clapton sounded really mad, but so cool.
SRV: Clapton knew what he was gonna say!
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: He played like B. B. King and Buddy Guy, and it made it seem okay for me to like this because somebody else who’s not black was doing it. When Clapton played, he sounded like he knew what the last note of the solo was going to be before he even started. Hearing all that great music as a kid was like developing an appetite and you kept looking for more.
I used to go through the dumpster behind The Ron Chapman Show, a teenybopper after-school show on Dallas TV, because they would throw out all the 45s that the record companies sent in. I found a promotional copy of “Purple Haze,” which hadn’t made its way to Texas yet. I had seen a little bitty article about Hendrix in a magazine, and his name stuck with me because he was holding a guitar. I brought it home, and it sounded like Muddy Waters’s stepchild, like Muddy had come back from a tour of Mars. When I heard that stuff, I thought, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”
CASCIO: Stevie was a huge Jimi Hendrix fan. He had this giant three-ring binder with hundreds of pictures of Jimi that he’d show me when we visited his house.
In the summer of 1966, Jimmie joined the Chessmen, a popular band with a record deal, which was formed two years earlier by North Texas State students. Jimmie was replacing founding guitarist and singer Robert Patton, who had drowned in a sailing accident. Jimmie took over his guitar role, while drummer Doyle Bramhall assumed the lead vocals. This was the first time Bramhall worked with a Vaughan; he would remain a crucial member of their inner circle for the rest of his life.
The Chessmen mostly played covers—Beatles tunes as well as the blues rock of Jimi Hendrix, the Yardbirds, and Cream. They were very popular on the club and college circuit, often playing fraternity parties. Jimmie was fifteen.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: Everyone else in the band was twenty-one, and I was this little kid with attitude and a Telecaster. I knew all the licks.
SCOTT PHARES, bassist in Liberation, Stevie’s high school band: Jimmie Vaughan was the king of the mountain, the god of Oak Cliff guitar players. Everyone knew his name.
MIKE KINDRED, Oak Cliff native, Triple Threat Revue pianist, composer of “Cold Shot”: The Chessmen were local rock stars. There were other bands with followings, but
none with the same gravity or depth; the Chessmen were head and shoulders above everyone else. We were all in awe of both Jimmie, the hottest guitarist, and Doyle, the great drummer who could sing as well as any black guy.
CONNIE VAUGHAN, Oak Cliff native, married to Jimmie Vaughan, 1980–2000: Jimmie was an Oak Cliff star walking through junior high school hallways with a twin on each arm.
DOYLE BRAMHALL, songwriting partner and longtime friend and bandmate of both Stevie’s and Jimmie’s; died 2011: Jimmie was fifteen and I was seventeen when he joined the Chessmen, so I could drive and he couldn’t, and I would pick him up, usually just pulling up in front and honking. But one time in 1966, he wasn’t ready, so he waved me in. I was sitting in the living room waiting, and Jimmie walked from the back bedroom to the kitchen, and I heard this guitar playing going on from the other direction. I walked down the hall and a bedroom door was a little ajar, and I saw this little skinny kid sitting on the bed playing Jeff Beck’s “Jeff’s Boogie.” As soon as he saw me, he stopped playing, and I said, “Don’t stop.” He gave me this shy little smile and said, “Hi, I’m Stevie,” and I said, “Hi, I’m Doyle. Keep playing. You’re very good.” Thirty seconds later, Jimmie ran up and said, “Let’s go.”
I didn’t even know Jimmie had a brother, and I was like, “There’s another one?” Because Jimmie was so good and it was clear that Stevie had it from the get-go, too.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: It was crazy. I was making $300 a week—more than my father. I was spoiled by the music, so I didn’t do all the stuff that normal kids do. I forgot to be a kid. I made straight As through about fifth grade, then I lost interest and started thinking about cars and guitars. I flunked the ninth grade at L. V. Stockard Junior High. I wasn’t doing my work or showing up. The last day of school, Doyle had got a new GTO, and he said, “I’m gonna come get you,” and I said, “Cool … let me know when.” I knew I had flunked out, so I just ran out the door and jumped in his car, and we drove off to a gig. The next year, the manager of the Chessmen talked to the principal at Browne Junior High, and I went there.
KINDRED: Jimmie and I were in ninth grade at T. W. Browne, and I saw him get thrown out for having long hair. They came right up and grabbed him out of the lunch line. His hair was not even Beatles length, but that was too much for the time and place.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: We made up the hair story. I got thrown out of Browne quickly for not showing up, and the excuse we used was that they wanted me to cut my hair and I wouldn’t. After Browne, I went to Oak Cliff Christian, which was a private school for misfits, and completed my ninth-grade requirements. I had a one-track mind and just wanted to play guitar.
Jimmie moved into an apartment in North Dallas with other members of the Chessmen. He did not come around home too often for a couple of years. With Jimmie gone, Stevie had no shield or distractions between him and his father.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: My father started drinking in the navy, and though he never said so, he was an alcoholic. The guys he worked with were alcoholics, too, in my estimation. They’d come over and drink. I’d come home from school, and they’d all be sitting around the table with a quart of whiskey in the middle and get real quiet when I walked in. They probably quit talking about whatever they were talking about as soon as they heard the door. That was just normal stuff in those days. My mother would say they were just “drinking men.”
SRV: There were a lot of characters hanging around. Those guys would come over and get drunk.
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: After I left, they really locked down on Stevie: “You’re not gonna do like he did.” That just made him try harder!
SRV: By the time I was twelve, Jimmie was gone. Here he was, the hottest guitar player I knew of, considered the hottest guitar player in Texas at age fifteen. I mean, what do you do but get excited when all this is going on?
JIMMIE VAUGHAN: My dad was scared that I’d go down the wrong path. He did the best he could and was trying to warn me and protect me. I grew my hair out, but the long hair was the smallest part of it. People like me were trying to find our way, so we were rejecting stuff, and I had to decide for myself the life I wanted to live.
ANN WILEY, Martha Vaughan’s sister: Martha was not at all happy that Jimmie had dropped out of school. She did not want to see the same thing happen with Stevie.
SRV: When Jimmie left, they thought they were going to lose me, too. After he moved out, we didn’t hear from Jimmie for a long time.
Shortly after Jimmie left home, the Vaughans suddenly moved again, relocating to Graham, Texas, a town of fewer than ten thousand residents about 120 miles from Oak Cliff. Stevie was ripped away from everyone and everything he knew and cared about, including his musician friends. He was beaten up at his new school and suspended regularly. He felt miserable and alienated. After six months, just after he declared to his parents he would no longer attend school in Graham, they moved back to Oak Cliff.
Settling back in, Stevie had his first and last job that did not involve six strings, working as a dishwasher at a restaurant. It did not go well. “One of my jobs was to take out the trash, and I slipped on something and fell about ten feet on top of a huge barrel where we put all the hot grease,” Vaughan told writer Michael Corcoran in 1989 in the Phoenix New Times. “Luckily, the lid was on or I could’ve been scalded real bad. Well, the owner came out and saw that I had cracked the lid with my fall, so she started yelling at me. I could’ve been killed, and all she cared about was her damn lid.”
Stevie said that he quit right then and stomped home “as angry as I’ve ever been … put on an Albert King record as loud as it would go and … decided that I was going to be like Albert King.”
By late 1967, Stevie had a new band, the Brooklyn Underground (preceded by the very short-lived Epileptic Marshmallow), which would last through much of 1968. They played dances at venues, including Candy’s Flare, a converted National Guard armory.
The Chessmen opened for the Jimi Hendrix Experience in February 1968 at the State Fair Music Hall in Dallas. “It’s embarrassing to even think about, but we opened up with ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ or some other Cream song—because we couldn’t play any Hendrix!” says Jimmie. “I was wearing a jacket with feathers on it because I was trying to be like Hendrix as much as I could.”
After the show, Jimi’s roadie asked Jimmie if he would swap his Vox wah pedal for Hendrix’s broken pedal plus some cash, a trade the young guitarist happily agreed to. Then he and his bandmates were swept into the dressing room for a quick meeting. “They all thought it was funny. ‘These guys sound like the Cream.’ I was pretty good at copying people.”
The Chessmen also opened for Janis Joplin, who took a shine to the young guitarist and invited him to look her up if he ever made it to San Francisco. “I guess she thought I was cute,” says Jimmie.
JOHN STAEHALEY, Austin guitarist in Krackerjack and Spirit: I met Jimmie when we were both fifteen. It was incredible watching him nail “Jeff’s Boogie” and “Crossroads.” He was playing a Les Paul through a Marshall, so he had not only the touch but the tone! I lived in Austin, and the Chessmen, along with other great Dallas bands, including Don Henley’s, would come down to play University of Texas frat parties and a couple of clubs.
BRAMHALL: I was real spoiled because the first eight or nine years that I played music, I played with either Jimmie or Stevie. At fifteen, Jimmie was already just real. He wanted it to be just right.
MARC BENNO, Dallas guitarist who recorded with the Doors, Leon Russell, and others: The first time I heard Jimmie, I thought he was the best guitar player I had ever heard. He could play fast. Really fast. He had a style that’s in between his own current style and Stevie Ray’s. Early on, Jimmie played a lot more like Stevie than anyone realizes. He could play fast as lightning, but he wasn’t impressed with that.
CUTTER BRANDENBURG, SRV friend, crew member, 1980–1983: Jimmie was the one who created this wild kid. He may not have realized how much his love of music was flowing through his little broth
er, but Stevie would never love another guitarist more than Jimmie.
SRV: If you want to know what made me go crazy with it, it was watching Jimmie, and, not trying to outdo him, but, shit, what do you do but pick up the ball and run? It’s not trying to pass him, and it’s not trying to keep up with him. It’s more like, “Wow! Look what big brother stumbled onto!”
A lot of people seem to think that we’re trying to beat each other at something, but it’s not that at all. I saw him get real exciting—not just excited, but exciting—with something, and that excited me. I didn’t know what else to do.
CONNIE VAUGHAN: Stevie was a loner who was bullied because he wasn’t a jock in a very jock-dominated school. I was a year ahead of him and started looking out for him in middle school. When we were at Kimball, he would come over and rehearse all the time in the playroom my parents had built above our garage. All he wanted to do was play music.
RODDY COLONNA, Oak Cliff native, drummer in Blackbird: I was two years ahead of Steve at Kimball High, which was pretty redneck, and I’d see him in the hallways: a weird-looking little guy wearing hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans, a paisley shirt, teardrop sunglasses that were too big for his head, and a little sash around his waist. I was eighteen and Stevie was fourteen or fifteen. I think he wanted to meet me because I was in a band, and he came up and said, in a low, deep voice with a halting delivery: “Uh … hey, Roddy … I’m Steve Vaughan. My brother is Jimmie Vaughan.”
We started eating lunch together, then jammed, and I was impressed with his chops. Eric Clapton was his idol, and he was playing solos on songs like “Crossroads” note for note. One time, he brought a sunburst Strat that I knew was Jimmie’s—it had the stick-on “JLV” letters on it—to the school practice room. And I knew Jimmie would have hit the ceiling if he knew Stevie had that guitar in school!